Blown Up Cards

DRAGONBALL Z: COLLECTIBLE CARD GAME (GBA – Originally Released May 29th, 2002)

I love playing trading card games. I have played Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokèmon, and Magic the Gathering. I also love to watch some DragonBall Z. When I heard about DragonBall Z the collectible Card Game for the Gameboy Advance, I thought the two would be a perfect match for me. I was hoping for a fun time facing off against my favorite characters.   Alas, you try to dream big and get blown up like Yamcha.

DBZ the collectible card game is atrocious. I had spent 20 minutes trying to figure out  how to play this game and that was AFTER the tutorial and AFTER I had gone out of my way to research the game. The tutorial doesn’t really explain anything to you and more or less commands you to do something. It’s not very informative and I was still confused after playing that. I had to open up wikipedia to help teach me how to play and even that was rough on the eyes. I need to call up Shenron to help me fix this hot mess of a card game.

The game starts off by a player drawing 3 cards. They can discard their hand to 3 cards and pass or choose to attack. If that player chooses to attack then the defending player draws 3 cards and tries to defend. There are physical attack cards, energy attack cards, non-combat cards, mastery cards (based on race or color) and personality cards (you have 3 personality cards for yourself but can get more to team with you).

Personally, the game sounds good on paper but the execution is not as sound. You will keep going back and forth on turns and there is not a real skill to play. Your deck ends up being your life and if you can’t draw anymore cards or if your opponent levels up to their final form then you lose the game. It doesn’t live up to the expectations of other card games and I found myself losing… a lot…

The opponents are at max cards and have decked out decks from the beginning so you have to basically get lucky to win any match. I mean, you win cards once you win matches but it’s hard to get to winning when you are down 16 cards and the deck is your life! I am not very happy with how they scaled difficulty thinking anyone (all 25 of you) who plays this game knows how to play the real life card game.

Overall the rules have some sound to it and the concept sounds like fun, but with difficult opponents, lack of tutorial and just overall lack of continuity, this is not a game even for the die hard DBZ fans. DragonBall Z Collectible Card Game gets a 1 out of 5. This is NOT over 9000.